People sometimes wonder if intuition is always right because intuition appears to be so unpredictable. Why does intuition seem so unpredictable? Patajali, an Indian physician turned sage, suggested one possible answer when he wrote the Yoga Sutras in approximately B. Among other things, the book, which was designed to help people develop their mental, physical, and spiritual health and wellbeing, addressed the question: How do people know anything?
Patanjali described four ways you know something: by a its physical appearance, b the associations you have with it, c the meaning it has for you and d its spirit or essence. The way you know also determines how you experience intuition. When your primary modes of knowing are based on a the physical or material world and b your associations with it, intuition is an occasional guest in your life. Intuition does function at this level, but it is more like a tool that you pick up, or something that is suddenly there or not.
If you are working with intuition on these levels, it will seem unpredictable. When you are leading a fulfilling life, one with meaning for you level c , intuition can be fully integrated in your life and an equal partner with your logic, if you commit to it. Remember: intuition thrives in meaning and travels on love. When you love your life and its purpose, intuition becomes a way of life. You understand how it functions and know that you can count on intuition's wise and elegant input. The fourth way-spiritual or essence level knowing-allows you to be one with or resonant with that which you want to know.
At this level there is no separation between yourself and the other, so direct knowledge is available. Intuition in its purest form is always right. Therefore, it is worth cultivating. There are many things can help you identify your true intuition from other imagery that you may experience.
To begin, listen to your body and the signals it is giving. Try also to develop a focusing practice that allows you to achieve a calm, detached state where you can better identify what is going on.
And always examine your intuitive images to see if you recognize wishful thinking or projections in them. Goldstein, Joseph. Iyengar, BKS. Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Thorsons, HarperCollins Publishers, London. Palmer, Helen, Ed. Jeremy P. Vaughan, Frances E. Awakening Intuition. Is Intuition Always Right? More info on this topic. Intuition in Healthcare Home.
What is intuition? Is it always right? Across the globe. Common misconceptions. Experiencing intuition. Develop your intuition. Common worries. Improve health and wellbeing. Intuition in healthcare. Talking to your healthcare provider.
More intuition resources. Is logic always right? How do I identify true intuition? Example of Wishful Thinking. Elaine believed that her intuition had told her that she would be a contestant on a TV game show and began to prepare. When she excitedly went to Los Angeles to try out for the show, she was crushed when she was not chosen. When she examined her behavior later, Elaine realized that it was not true intuition, but her life-long desire to be on TV that was functioning.
Example of Projection. John thought that his intuition was telling him that Helen would dump him after three months of dating. Not wanting that to happen, John began to cling to the relationship as the dreaded prediction neared. Intuition has its place in decision making—you should not ignore your instincts any more than you should ignore your conscience—but anyone who thinks that intuition is a substitute for reason is indulging in a risky delusion.
Detached from rigorous analysis, intuition is a fickle and undependable guide—it is as likely to lead to disaster as to success.
And while some have argued that intuition becomes more valuable in highly complex and changeable environments, the opposite is actually true. The more options you have to evaluate, the more data you have to weigh, and the more unprecedented the challenges you face, the less you should rely on instinct and the more on reason and analysis.
The answer may lie, it now appears, in technology. Powerful new decision-support tools can help executives quickly sort through vast numbers of alternatives and pick the best ones.
When combined with the experience, insight, and analytical skills of a good management team, these tools offer companies a way to make consistently sound and rational choices even in the face of bewildering complexity—a capability that intuition will never match.
The stories are certainly seductive. Fred Smith has an insight into the transport business and, despite widespread skepticism, goes on to create Federal Express. George Soros senses in his bones a big shift in currency markets and, acting on that hunch, makes a billion-dollar killing. Robert Pittman has a vision of the future of on-line media while taking a shower and rushes to lead America Online in an entirely new direction. The reason such tales whether apocryphal or not have become business legends is that we want to believe in the transformative power of intuition.
It raises business above the drab world of spreadsheets and income statements and turns it into something of an art form.
The executive office becomes a place of inspiration and vision rather than planning and number crunching. For another, it simplifies. We just need to relax, close our eyes, and let the magic happen. Finally, it makes us feel special. But then they reach senior management, where the problems get more complex and ambiguous, and we discover that their judgment or intuition is not what it should be. But our desire to believe in the wisdom of intuition blinds us to the less romantic realities of business decision making.
We remember the examples of hunches that pay off but conveniently forget all the ones that turn out badly. Michael Eisner was responsible for the debacle of the EuroDisney opening, not to mention recent box-office turkeys The Country Bears and Treasure Planet. George Soros lost a fortune speculating in Russian securities in the late s and then promptly lost another one betting on tech stocks in Its definition can be stretched to mean almost anything, from innate instinct to professional judgment to plain-old common sense.
Scholars of human cognition have shown that our thinking is subject to all sorts of biases and flaws, most of which operate at a subconscious level—at the level, in other words, of intuition. We naturally give more weight to information that confirms our assumptions and prejudices, for example, while dismissing information that would call them into question. The most dangerous of these flaws, when it comes to intuition, is our deep-seated need to see patterns. But it can get us into trouble.
When confronted with a new phenomenon, our brains try to categorize it based on our previous experiences, to fit it into one of the patterns stored in our memories. The problem is that, in making that fit, we inevitably filter out the very things that make the new phenomenon new—we rush to recycle the reactions and solutions from the past. That instinct, seemingly hardwired into our thinking by evolution, is extremely useful in life-or-death situations where fine distinctions are irrelevant.
The benefit of a careful analysis of the situation would be far outweighed by the risk of inaction. But managers are not cavemen.
Intuition is a means not of assessing complexity but of ignoring it. The more complex the situation, the more misleading intuition becomes. In a truly chaotic environment—where cause and effect no longer have a linear relationship—the last thing you want to do is try to apply patterns to it. The essence of such an environment is the lack of any discernible pattern in its evolution. Indeed, the human drive to find patterns is so strong that they are often read into perfectly random data.
Moreover, human beings like to assume that cause directly precedes effect, which makes it difficult to anticipate the second-, third-, and fourth-order effects of path dependence.
And sooner or later—probably sooner—your luck is going to run out. Just ask your average day trader. Impatient with ambiguity, the mind naturally seeks closure—that seems, in fact, to be one of the main functions of intuition—but an intelligent decision-making process often requires the sustained exploration of many alternatives.
You want to keep the process open as long as possible before converging on a final choice. Intuition presents another, even more insidious problem: It masks me-too thinking.
We like to assume that our intuition is uniquely our own, a distillation of our particular experiences and insights. We live in a vast echo chamber, and the voice of intuition we hear inside our heads is increasingly the same voice that speaks to everyone else. Technology may hold the key.
Many of these new decision-support tools are still in the early stages of development and have yet to be applied to strategic business decisions. But they hold enormous potential for helping executives carry out the two key components of decision-making or problem-solving exercises: searching for possible solutions and evaluating those solutions in order to choose the best one or ones.
The more complex and fast-changing the situation, the more challenging both search and evaluation become. By expanding the analytical as well as the intuitive capabilities of the mind, the new programs allow a much faster, a much fuller, and a much more rigorous exploration of the options. Making a decision or solving a problem entails two tasks. Think Advisor. Thank you for sharing! Your article was successfully shared with the contacts you provided.
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